Bob Collins
Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher at the center of a high-profile fight with the federal government over grazing and the seizure of cattle, let his inner racist out, and that has Republicans who embraced him scurrying.
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MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Politics
When the Wisconsin Republican Party holds its annual convention in a few weeks, delegates will be asked to vote on a resolution supporting Wisconsin’s right to secede from the union. Read more →
It was a good run and we got some neat parades and bragging rights out of it, but democracy is dead in the United States, or so a study from Princeton and Northwestern universities tells us. Read more →
A man in Iowa is fuming because his daughters are no longer allowed to shoot at their favorite gun range. Read more →
The Minnesota Legislature is slowly moving a bill stripping them of their immunity if arrested, although the sense is it’s only because of the publicity the bill has generated.
It’s been impossible to find out how often the so-called ‘get out of jail’ card is being used, although the tepid reaction to the proposed legislation suggests it gets played fairly often. Read more →
When you listen to members of Congress talk about the Internet and matters of technology, it can make your grandmother with the flashing ’12:00′ on her VCR sound like Steve Jobs. It’s not an act. Read more →
The passage of a higher minimum wage bill has border businesses singing the blues. Read more →
There are a couple of competing ways to look at this graphic, from a survey asking people in the United States to indicate where Ukraine is. One is, ‘Wow, are people ever ignorant.’ The other is: ‘Wow, Americans got it right a lot of the time.’ Read more →
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case of a New Mexico photographer who refused the job of photographing a same-sex commitment ceremony. You may recall in the Legislature’s debate about same-sex marriage, the mythical wedding photographer who would be forced to take pictures against her will was a common theme.
Elaine Huguenin is that photographer and her case is the first to reach the Supreme Court, which wanted nothing to do with it. It rejected the case without comment. Read more →
The resignation of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich because he donated $1,000 six years ago to the effort to ban same-sex marriage in California, has renewed several debates: Should disclosure requirements be loosened? Is there a free-speech component to a legal campaign contribution? What kind of personal opinions disqualify a person from being CEO?
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The former head of MNsure says she didn’t mislead anybody when the health care exchange went live last October. Yes, she did. Read more →
The U.S. Senate is pondering a resolution offering an apology to Elsie Moren of Two Harbors and thousands of others like her, the Duluth News Tribune reports today. Moren’s ‘crime’? She married a non-citizen of the United States and, because of the law at the time, she lost her citizenship. She died a non-citizen in her own country.
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Today’s story in the Washington Post about the fading tradition of a concession phone call after a tough-fought campaign reveals the central problem with politics: Decency is a sign of weakness. Read more →
If you do nothing else today, make a run to the NPR website that’s been set up in support of the network’s Morning Edition series from the U.S.-Mexico border. Read more →
Today’s Supreme Court decision that appears to open the floodgates of campaign contributions is rooted in this question: What is corruption? The word appears 124 times in today’s opinon.
In its ruling today, the Court said the limits are arbitrary because they set a point at which a campaign contribution is corruption. Read more →